Sunday, July 01, 2018

We must speak of Jewish refugees - for truth and peace

Two blogs argue that the Palestinians have hoodwinked the West into believing in the deception of the 'right of return' and the justice of their cause. Lyn Julius explains that the 'right of return' is a recipe for war, while Karen Hurvitz calls out the Palestinians on the 'big lie' of their victimhood. Both writers remark that the Palestinians are not unique in their displacement, and that we should speak of the Jewish refugees too:

Lyn Julius

Lyn Julius writes in her Jewish News/ Times of Israel blog:
The idea that the refugees should return to
Israel, and not to Palestine, runs counter to the two-state solution.
What is the point of establishing a Palestinian state if the Palestinian
refugees still cling to their ultimate objective of returning to
Israel?

Apart from the fact that it would soon turn
Israel into a majority-Arab state, little thought is given to the mayhem
that such a return would produce. Refugee questions after such a long
lapse of time have not been solved by return. The great majority of
Palestinian refugees today never lived in the homes that they are
programmed to ‘return’ to. Most might no longer exist. In 2010 the
European Court of Human Rights ruled against Greek Cypriots who demanded
to return to their properties in the northern part of the island now
under Turkish-Cypriot control. As so much time had elapsed since 1974
when the Turks invaded the island, the Court ruled, in the words of Tel
Aviv professor Asher Susser, that ‘it was necessary to ensure that the
redress offered for these old injuries did not create disproportionate
new wrongs’. If this was true for Cyprus since 1974 it is all the more
true for Palestine since 1948.

But the issue of the Palestinian refugees
needs to be seen alongside the parallel plight of the Jewish refugees,
who fled Arab countries for Israel in roughly equal numbers at about the
same time. A permanent exchange of refugee populations occurred. The
last thing the Jews want is a ‘right of return’ to countries which
remain as hostile and antisemitic as the day the refugees fled.

As long as the Right of Return is the
cornerstone of the Palestinians’ strategy, the 650,000 Jewish refugees
who fled from Arab lands to Israel remain its antidote. Yet the issue of
the Jewish refugees is either denied or ignored. When Jewish and
Palestinian ‘narratives’ are juxtaposed, the Jewish refugees remain
invisible. When Fisk goes hunting for original Palestinian homes and the
locks which fit the Palestinian keys, invariably he finds a Jew from
Poland or Romania now occupying the Arab home, never a Jew from Yemen or
Iraq. In other words, Jews did not come to Israel because they were
fleeing Arab and Muslim antisemitism.The innocent Palestinian is ‘paying
the price of the Nazi Holocaust’ – a European crime.

In the same breath as we speak about
Palestinians who were displaced by the creation of Israel, so too should
we speak of Jews who were forced to leave their homes in Arab
countries. Massive exoduses of Jews took place in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, mostly from Iraq, Yemen and Libya. At least 90 percent of
those Jewish populations had to flee, forced to leave all of their
possessions behind.

Overall, more than 850,000 Jews were kicked
out of Arab lands and exactly zero of them claim refugee status today.
Just between the years 1948 and 1951, 260,000 Jews from Arab countries
immigrated to Israel and a few years later, following the 1956 Suez
Crisis, another 25,000 Jews were expelled from Egypt. Israel is largely a
country made up of Jewish refugees and their children, and these are
the very people that a refugee organization now seeks to displace —
other refugees!

Jews do not refer to the slaughters, pogroms, property confiscation and deportations they endured in Arab countries as nakbas (the
Arabic word for catastrophes). Instead of using these slaughters and
expulsions to drive their narrative, Jewish Israelis have chosen to
build a country. None of them, including the Holocaust survivors who (to
put it mildly) had the right to be heart-wrenchingly furious after
losing most of their families, have ever returned to their countries of
origin to throw bombs, stab civilians, run down people with vans, and
commit other acts of terror and revenge.

We should take to heart the suggestion of Professor Ada Aharoni, chairman of The World Congress of the Jews from Egypt, who stated in his Ynet article
“What about the Jewish Nakba?” that publicizing the expulsion of Jews
from Arab states could aid the peace process. It would show the world —
and the Palestinians — that they are not unique in their experience of
displacement and that instead of destroying, they could just as easily
redefine themselves as a nation that builds itself up in the face of
displacement. Not only would this be a productive way to channel their nakba, but it would also dispel their necessity to channel Joseph Goebbels by continuing to propagate their “big lie.”

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)